Making the Web Work for ICIG :
Letter from the Head

Alan Kirkpatrick, ICIG Head
University of Colorado-Boulder

When I joined ICIG in 1999, the Web was just beginning to be a reliable resource for jobs and internships. Students were arriving at the CU-Boulder School of Journalism and Mass Communication with enough Web savvy that it usually took them but a few minutes to grasp the benefits of career-related URLs I would show them.

Although I endeavor to keep it updated, that list is increasingly gathering dust - for some good and not-so-good reasons.

I find that I am no longer the best resource at the School for keeping an eye out for new job and internship opportunities on the Web. The students themselves, through efficient and aggressive searching, are usually the ones to discover those opportunities. And they're also increasingly effective at telling each other about what's where.

New possibilities, however, often are not better ones. So while my role as Web trailblazer has diminished, I now must spend a lot more time as guide and philospher, helping students evaluate their discoveries.

Many have developed what I call the "eBay" mentality for finding internships, jobs and study-abroad programs. The eBay approach is to assume that you can probably find anything you want on the Web, and that when you do, somehow it will turn out to be exactly as advertised, exactly what you had in mind and exactly what you need. Needless to say, a few students using this method strike gold and most strike out.

If I'm finding an increasing need to keep pace with students' Web expeditions, I know others are as well. I'm hoping the new Web sites that ICIG will post later this summer will help.

The first phase of the School's Web development plan calls for the posting of three new sites:

o A directory of internship and career faculty and staff at college and university journalism programs. To help each other, we need to be able to find each other.

o A list of links to internships and careers at college and university journalism programs. To keep some of us from spending so much time re-inventing the wheel and rediscovering fire.

o A summary of federal laws relevant to interns and young professionals. To help get and keep us on the same page, and to provide a site to which we can refer employers.

The creation of these sites will completes the first phase of the ICIG master plan for Web resource development. (Goals for years 2 and 3 of the master plan were included in my 2002 message from the head.)

Just as some of you came forth to help develop the plan, I'm hoping others will be interested in helping implement it.

Anne Hoag of Penn State, who three years ago transformed the ICIG newsletter into a Web site and who has brought our group repeated recognition from AEJ for communication innovation, is leaving that position. We are presently trying to find a suitable permanent home for the site. The change needs to be completed by the end of this summer.

I have offered to house the site here at the University of Colorado at Boulder and develop a small Web committee to coordinate its development with ICIG officers for the next few years. Please contact me if you are interested in helping develop what I hope will become a leading journalism careers resource.

ICIG Web development will be discussed further at our annual business meeting in Kansas City. The meeting begins at 6:45 p.m. Thursday, July 31.

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Breaking News?
A Print Person in a Broadcast World:
My Faculty Fellowship Experience

Linda Jones
Roosevelt University

My quest for an Excellence in Journalism Education fellowship began two years ago at an AEJMC panel in which several of the program's fellows described the fun they'd had as teachers-turned-broadcasters for part of a summer.

As I recall it, one had been an anchor, another said he'd done a live shot. But then someone asked a crucial question that I remember distinctly: "Can print people do this?"
The panelists looked pained and said, well, no; stations were looking for people with broadcasting background who actually could contribute something to the operation.

Although I was and am a print person, the product of 13 years in newspapers, I started planning my application right then. The fellowship, I reasoned, would be a quickie immersion in broadcasting that would be just the thing for a broadcast-challenged school director like me. My angle, I decided as I pondered my application, was to emphasize the convergence focus that our school has been edging toward over the past several years. With a small faculty (just eight of us) I need to know how to do just about everything. (This is the department-head-as-utility-infielder school of thought.) How could I be effective without broadcast experience.

It worked. The Radio-TV News Directors Foundation took me (for better or for worse, as Margaret Ershler, the program's coordinator, told me at one point). Placing me at a station was no easy task because - as I'd heard at AEJMC - the stations really do want someone who can do some work.

Margaret found a spot for me at WCNC-TV in Charlotte, N.C., which as it happens is the station that was the subject of the PBS documentary "Local News." I was assigned to the web site, www.nbc6.com, run by Jim Gilchriest, a news director-turned-web site director who ran a thinly staffed four-person operation. Even with the small group, the site regularly beat other Charlotte news sites when something broke. Jim told me in one of our first talks, "We own breaking news."

Well, I know breaking news and I write fast. I also started at dailies as a police reporter. So it seemed as if we were a good fit.

Within a day of starting in Charlotte, I was writing stories. Most of them were crime, and almost all of them were pulled directly from the daybook notes kept by the assignment desk. Occasionally we'd rework stories that aired on the station. But for a print journalist, this is familiar territory: rewrite.

So old skills were new again, perfectly in tune with the demands of the web.
I loved my WCNC-TV experience. In addition to seeing broadcast operations up close and personal, I learned that there's a place for print journalists in a web-site world.
The experience also reinforced the emphasis our program here at Roosevelt puts on writing for print, broadcast and online: Two of nbc6.com's staffers with broadcast degrees told me the hardest part of moving to the web site was getting used to writing more than lead-ins to pictures. And another EJE fellow told us that her station, while she was assigned to it, decreed that broadcast reporters would file same-day online versions of their stories. At that station, there was no separate web operation, and no question about convergence.

With my first broadcasting experience behind me, I'm now working toward something else that looks alluring: a week-long producer academy run by another foundation. My interest was piqued during EJE training last year by industry professionals who told us that producers are scarce … and when I hear "scarce," I envision an opportunity for our students. I didn't make the producer academy this year, but there's always another application season.

As a friend who is a 2003 RTNDF "educator in the newsroom" said as we talked about what awaits him this summer: "There are so many opportunities out there … Why wouldn't you go for them?"

My view exactly.

Note: The EJE fellowships have undergone a name change: They're now called "Educators in the Newsroom" fellowships. For information about applications, check http://www.rtnda.org/

On the Eve of My Internship:
Professor Puts Preaching to Practice

Dana Rosengard
University of Memphis

For almost ten years, I welcomed interns into the newsrooms in which I was working. From Mississippi to Massachusetts, I took them hoping to teach them a thing or two and have them help me in the daily battle of putting a live newscast on the air.

For almost as long, I have been sending my students off to be those interns - young journalists who took the teachings from my classroom to the newsrooms of their future. I hoped they were well prepared and expected them to be well received and appreciated.

Now I am about to become the intern. Under the auspices of the Radio Television News Directors Foundation fellowship program, I am in a strange place anxious to begin a familiar drill, just from the opposite side of the coin, that is. I write this on the eve of day one of my work at KBJR-TV/NBC 6 in Duluth, Minnesota. Tomorrow I will enter a newsroom much the same as I did that first time in 1985, hundreds of miles from home and not knowing anything about the people or the place I'm about to cover.

At least this time I know I'm more excited than nervous, not the case all those years ago.Of course this time around I know what a VOSOT is and what a producer does. Neither was the case on day one 18 years ago. Of course this time around I am older, wiser and much more seasoned. That perhaps is why KBJR News Director Dave Jensch agreed to take me on as part of the RTNDF Educator-in-the-Newsroom program, aimed at putting university-level broadcast educators in newsrooms to refresh their skills, master new technologies and develop contacts and partnerships with news managers to improve classroom curricula. In addition to doing some field reporting (hopefully to include some interactive stand-ups and live shots I can use as examples in classes), Jensch is hoping I will use my top-10 market producing experience to serve as executive producer in his newsroom that is filled with young producers.

Working with producers is a natural task for me, as I teach one of those rare college courses dedicated solely to just that skills set back at the University of Memphis. This work also nudges me to face my hands-on innocence with new technology now common place in many newsrooms. Direct-to-computer network feeds, non-linear editing and virtual newsrooms are all new tools of the trade since I left the full-time affiliate newsroom back in 1994. While I certainly understand how they all work, I'm less equipped to push the right buttons to make them happen.

But regardless of the technology, the lowest common denominators of good local news have remained the same: fast and fair reporting, clear and clever writing, strong visuals, story-telling that connects your viewer to the news and purposeful use of live technology. In these areas I remain quite confident I can be of good use to the corps of producers I'll call colleagues for the next four weeks at KBJR. I guess I see them as a new set of students, non-traditional though they may be with diplomas already in hand, you’re never too old to learn new tricks and methods.

And taking a spoonful of my own medicine, maybe I will come to master how to download network material and edit on my desktop computer after all. Regardless, I'm sure I'll add a few tools and techniques to my bag of tricks to take back home to use in my classrooms and student newsroom and that's exactly what the RTNDF program, sponsored by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, is all about. I'll keep you posted on how it all works out in the end - what I learned and what I survived.

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Research Notes

Marian Azzaro, ICIG Research Chair
Roosevelt University

Be sure to attend this year's scholar-to-scholar session on Thursday, July 31 at 1:30. ICIG accepted two fine papers this year which share a theme: empirical research to inform practice. The first paper by JoAnn L. Roznowski and Brenda J. Wrigley is titled, "An Application of Message Sidedness: Encouraging Undergraduate Participation in Internship Programs." The second,
"Preparing for a Career in the Unknown: What Convergent Newsroom Managers Need and Want" is authored by
Lynn M. Zoch, Ph.D. and Erik L. Collins, Ph.D., J.D.

Roznowski and Wrigley's research is theory-driven, using the Heuristic Systematic Model of persuasion and message sidedness theory and an experimental design to examine attitudes and beliefs about student internship participation. Meanwhile, Zoch and Collins' work focuses on the convergence newsroom challenge in hiring and educating journalists for careers in multiple-media newsgathering.

These fine papers continue ICIG's hallmark of high quality research, both theory-driven and empirically-based, that informs and can improve media industry practice, professionalism and management. Last year's papers show how broad career and internship research can be, and yet still serve the goal of building best practices: Lauren A. Vicker's 2002 paper studied the use of internship supervisor evaluations as a way to assess an academic program. B. Gail Wilson presented her paper on the importance of and content of portfolios for graduating students seeking entry-level jobs in television newsrooms. John E. Getz's paper researched the perceptions of journalism students regarding the value of internships.

Think about your own research agenda for the coming year -- does it include a career or internship research question?

Whatever your research idea, circle April 1, 2004 on your calendar and make plans to join us in Toronto in August, 2004.. Contact me with any questions, or to volunteer as a reviewer of paper submissions, at mailto:mazzaro@roosevelt.edu

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ICIG Pathways

Evonne H. (Von) Whitmore, ICIG Vice-Head & Program Chair
Kent State University

I've been thinking about the road ahead for the Internship and Career Interest Group at this year's AEJMC convention. The collaborations and partnerships forged during the mid-winter conference, offer numerous ways to get ICIG to our ultimate destinations -- leadership and visibility in Kansas City. The full roadmap of ICIG activities at the 2003 conference is listed in this newsletter (Click here for the conference schedule!). You'll notice that we have programmed events for almost every day of the meeting, with strategic stops along the way, including pre-convention activities on July 29th. The itinerary will also show that some topics will cover familiar ground but other areas lead to new directions, such as our panel on the future of careers in advertising.

When we find ourselves traveling in many different directions there are often obvious lessons we can learn from the experience. Those remain to be seen. But what do this year's multiple sessions really mean for ICIG? Well, for one thing, it gives us something to build on for membership recruitment drives. It is also perhaps, a good reminder of just how integrally interwoven throughout all AEJMC activities are the founding concepts of ICIG. After all, as educators, we are ultimately in the business of helping students develop intellectually and professionally to secure future employment. Our joint convention efforts with other divisions are representative of our commitment to those goals.

Of course, it wouldn't be a true road trip without some excursions along the way. I'm told there will be plenty of great eateries and jazz clubs to check out in Kansas City as well. All in all, the road ahead to AEJMC's 2003 Convention looks very promising. I have enjoyed the journey.

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